The Penguin History of the World

5 Openings and Closures

Well before the collapse of the USSR, it was clear that very little of the world would remain wholly unaffected by what was happening in Europe. Immediately, the end of the Cold War re-awoke old questions of identity throughout that continent and beyond, as well as presenting new ones. Peoples began to see themselves and others afresh, in the light of what soon turned out to be for some a chilly dawn; some nightmares had blown away, but only to reveal troubled landscapes. Fundamental questions about identity, ethnicity and religion could again be asked, and some of these questions were disturbing. Once again new determining circumstances were emerging in world history.

Almost incidentally, not only had one half of Europe’s security arrangements disappeared with the Warsaw Pact, but the other half, NATO, had also been subtly changed. The collapse of the USSR, the major potential opponent, had deprived the alliance not only of its main role, but also of the pressure that had shaped it. Like a blancmange in a warm room, it began to sag a little. Even if, as some thought, a revived Russia were to emerge as a new threat at some future date, the disappearance of the ideological struggle would mean that potential opponents would have to think in new ways about it. There were soon ex-Communist countries seeking to join NATO. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, and Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic countries followed five years later. In total contravention of the promises the United States president George H. W. Bush had given Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, NATO had expanded not just up to the borders of the old Soviet Union, but beyond them. The alliance had become an instrument for linking most of Europe (minus Russia) to the United States. But the purpose of its military power was by no means clear, even if in the mid-1990s the American government began to look to NATO as a machine for dealing with new European problems, notably in the former Yugoslavia, and for use outside the European area.

After the Cold War, the fate of peoples in eastern and south-eastern Europe seemed for the first time in the century entirely and evidently in their own hands. Like the old dynastic empires or the extemporizations of the German and Italian dictators in the Second World War, the Communist scaffolding of the region had now collapsed. As much buried history re-emerged and more was remembered or invented, what appeared was often discouraging. Slovaks felt restive about their inclusion in Czechoslovakia, but Slovakia itself had a large Hungarian percentage in its population, as did Romania. Hungarians could now agonize more openly over the treatment of Magyars both north and east of their borders. Above all, old issues escalated rapidly into new violence and crisis in the former Yugoslavia. In 1991, as all the former republics of the Yugoslav federal state declared their independence, wars were being fought between local Serbs and the new governments of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serb minorities were supported by the government in Belgrade, headed by the militant Serb nationalist Slobodan Milošević, and by the remnants of the Yugoslav federal army.

The civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina led to the worst atrocities against civilians in Europe since the end of the Second World War, as the three main ethnic groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks – tried to control as much territory as possible, often driving out the other population groups as they advanced. At Srebrenica Serb forces massacred several thousand Bosniak civilians in 1995, and Serbs besieged the Bosnian capital Sarajevo from 1992 until 1995. Both the European Union (as the EC was now called) and the United States were reluctant to intervene, and it was only military setbacks for the Serbs that made an agreement possible at Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995. From being a peaceful mosaic of different ethnic groups, Bosnia-Herzegovina had given rise to the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ – the expulsion by force of peoples who were defined as enemies. Croatia made use of the decline in Serb military fortunes throughout the region to reclaim Krajina, driving out many of the majority Serb population there. Having gone from one disaster to another in his so-called ‘defence’ of the Serbs, Milošević was finally toppled in 2000, after his heavy-handed policy in the Albanian-dominated region of Kosovo had led to NATO intervention against his troops. Fearful of a repetition of the Bosnian atrocities, the western allies had at last found agreement to intervene.

Thus, the early 1990s left millions of east Europeans facing grave problems and difficulties. Agreement was lacking on legitimating principles and ideas. In so far as the region had possessed ‘modernizing’ élites, these, whether effective or not, were usually to be found in the old Communist hierarchies. Unavoidably, professionals, managers and experts whose careers had been made within the Communist structures continued to govern, because there was no one to replace them. Another problem was the fickleness of populations now voting freely as the immediate euphoria of political revolution ebbed. There was nostalgia for the apparent security of the old days. As people cast about for a new basis for the legitimacy of the state, the only plausible candidate often seemed to be the nationalism that had so often bedevilled past politics, sometimes for centuries. Old tribalisms had quickly resurfaced and imaginary histories were soon turning out to matter as much as what had actually happened in the past.

Some ancient confrontations had, tragically, been brought to an end by the Second World War. In the most horrifying and greatest instance, the Holocaust, as people had come to call the Nazis’ attempt to extirpate the Jewish people, had ended the story of eastern Europe as the centre of world Jewry. In 1901 three-quarters of the world’s Jews had lived there, mostly in the Russian empire. In those once Yiddish-speaking areas, only a little more than 3 per cent of Jews now live. Nearly half of the world’s Jews are now to be found in Israel, and the other half mainly in the United States. In eastern Europe, Communist parties anxious to exploit traditional popular anti-Semitism (not least in the Soviet Union) had encouraged emigration by harrying and judicial persecution. In a few countries this virtually eliminated what was left in 1945 of the Jewish population as a significant demographic element. Two hundred thousand Polish Jews surviving in 1945 had soon found themselves again victims of traditional pogrom and harassment, and by 2010 those who had not emigrated numbered a mere 3,000, less than 0.01 percent of the population. The heart of the old eastern European Jewry had gone.

In some western European countries, too, minorities showed a new recalcitrance. Basque separatists terrorized Spain. Walloons and Flemings nagged at one another in Belgium. Northern Ireland was probably the most striking instance. There, Unionist and Nationalist feeling continued throughout the 1990s to block the road to a political settlement. In 1998, in co-operation with the Irish government, British initiatives succeeded, against the odds, in winning the acquiescence of the official leaders of Sinn Féin and of the Ulster Unionists in getting accepted in an all-Ireland referendum proposals that went further than ever before in institutionalizing both safeguards for the Nationalist minority in the north and the historic tie of the north with the United Kingdom. This so-called ‘Good Friday Agreement’, of course, implied fundamental change in what the sovereignty of the Crown was to mean in the future (and incidentally went much further than the measures of devolution the British government was contemporaneously introducing in Scotland and Wales). It was to spare the province from the terrorist outrages that had dominated for nearly thirty years.

From 1986 the passports issued to citizens of the member states of the EC had carried the words ‘European Community’ as well as the name of the issuing state. In practice, however, the Community faced growing difficulties. Although the main central institutions – the Council of Ministers of Member States, the Commission and the Court of Justice – worked away, they did not do so without contention, while policy – notably over fisheries and transport – provoked well-publicized differences. Fluctuations in exchange rates were another source of awkwardness and institutional bickering, especially after the end of dollar convertibility and the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971 and the oil crisis. Yet in the 1980s there was solid evidence of encouraging economic success. The United States had resumed in the 1970s its pre-1914 status as a major recipient of foreign investment, and two-thirds of what it attracted was European. Western Europe accounted for the largest share of world trade, too. Outsiders became keen to join an organization that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986.

The latter turned out to be a decisive year, when it was agreed that a further step should be taken in 1992 to move beyond a mere customs union to a single, integrated, border-free internal market. After difficult negotiations, the Maastricht Treaty of December 1991 put in place arrangements for the single European market and a timetable for full economic and monetary union to be achieved not later than 1999. Capital, goods, services and people were to move freely without let or hindrance across national borders at last. Once again, reservations and special arrangements had to be made for the cautious British. Margaret Thatcher’s successor as prime minister, John Major, was something of an unknown quantity, but almost at once he found himself upholding his country’s position in the Maastricht negotiations at the head of a party divided over it.

The treaty that resulted opened the way to a single currency and an autonomous central bank to regulate it. Maastricht also gave citizenship of the new European Union (EU), which replaced the EC, to the nationals of all member states and laid down an obligation on its members to impose certain common standards in work practices and some social benefits. Finally, the treaty extended the area over which EU policy might be made by majority votes. All this looked like a significant accretion of centralized power, although in an effort to reassure the suspicious the treaty also set out agreement to the principle of ‘subsidiarity’, a word rooted in Catholic social teaching; it indicated that there should be limits to the competence of the Commission at Brussels in interfering with the details of national administration. As for agreement over European defence and security policy, this was soon in disarray thanks to events in Bosnia.

Maastricht raised difficulties in several countries. The Danes rejected it in a referendum the following year. A similar test in France produced only a slim majority in its favour. The British government (notwithstanding special safeguards it had negotiated) was hard-pressed to win the parliamentary vote on the issue. In the governing Conservative Party a split that had appeared over the matter was to cripple the party when it next faced the electors. European voters still usually thought in terms of protecting or damaging traditional sectional and national interests, and these loomed larger as economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s. But Maastricht was in the end ratified by fifteen member states. Debate continued over allegations of encroachment on the independence of member states by the Commission at Brussels and the comparative fairness or unfairness of individual countries’ use or abuse of the Union’s rules.

While the Maastricht process was created in part by the need felt by many member states – and especially France – for a deeper integration into Europe of the new and powerful united Germany, it soon took on a much wider significance. With Communism gone in eastern Europe, the need for a truly European Union – as the Community called itself after Maastricht – stood out. It is a testimony to the strength of the institutions created over half a century of European integration that the EU managed both to introduce a common currency (the Euro, from 2002), alongside an EU Central Bank and deeper co-operation on criminal justice, foreign policy and military affairs, while moving rapidly towards agreeing membership for central and eastern European countries. In 1995 the Cold War neutrals Austria, Finland and Sweden joined, while the big step eastwards came in 2004, with the accession of ten countries, among them Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and – most astonishingly of all – the former Baltic Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In spite of continued disagreement about its constitution, budget and plans for further expansion, the EU, with its 461 million population, had taken giant steps towards becoming the all-European union that its founders had envisaged.

Economic circumstances had changed, too. For all its importance, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) did not mean what it had meant in the 1960s; in some countries it was evolving from an electoral bribe to large numbers of smallholders to a system of subsidy for fewer, but much richer, agriculturalists. Within the new Union, too, national responses were not what they had been in the 1960s and even later. Germany now provided the driving force and much of the Union’s financial support. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s greatest triumph, German reunification, had confirmed Germany’s natural position as Europe’s major power. Yet this had been costly. Germany was driven into deficit on its trade account and dissatisfaction with the terms of reunification began to be heard. As time passed, more was also heard of the danger of inflation, an old nightmare for Germans, and of the load carried by the German tax-payer as former East Germans moved to the west and unemployment rose. Economic recession cast long shadows in most member states of the EU in the 1990s, reminding their peoples of disparities and differences of economic strength between them. Everywhere, too, fiscal, budgetary and exchange problems came in the 1990s to undermine the confidence of governments.

There was thus plenty for politicians to take into account. Views were changing everywhere. For the French, for example, the deepest root of the European impulse had always lain in fear of Germany, which their statesmen had sought to tie firmly into first the Common Market and then the Community. As the German economy grew stronger, though, they had been forced to recognize that it would have the preponderant share in mapping Europe’s future shape. De Gaulle’s ideal of a Europe of nation-states gave way among Frenchmen to a more federal – that is, paradoxically, more centralizing – view of a Europe consciously built so as to give a maximum of informal and cultural weight in it to France – through, for example, appointments at Brussels. If there were to be a European super-state, France could at least try to dominate it. None the less, the French decision in 1995 to rejoin NATO was a clear break with the ways of de Gaulle.

The German government after 1990 had soon sought to express its new influence by seeking to befriend its ex-Communist neighbours. The rapidity with which German businessmen and investors got to work in those countries and the speed and eagerness of Germany’s recognition of newly independent Croatia and Slovenia at the end of 1991 (it was the first country to do so) was far from reassuring to other EU members. How the EU was to expand was bound to be crucial for world history. A democratic and pluralist EU of almost 700 million citizens, stretching from the Arctic Circle to Antalya and from Faro to Kerch, might be one conceivable outcome, but another is a break-up (not necessarily into its national components) of what Union there is. Eventually, the question will appear of whether to attempt to integrate Russia, which is, in spite of its size and its autocratic tradition, undeniably a European country with many of those resources – human and material – that the EU will need for the continued welfare of its citizens.

There has of course been some cultural convergence within the Common Market, Community and EU over more than thirty years. Increasing standardization of consumption, though, owed less to European policy than to shrewder marketing and growing international communication at a popular level (the outcome was often, as in the past, deplored as ‘Americanization’). And such slow convergence as had been consciously promoted in, for instance, agriculture had been very costly, with the CAP understandably irritating non-farming voters. The Union seemed feeble, too, in its handling of external affairs; it blatantly failed the severe tests posed by Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Many uncertainties thus still hung over the future of Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Among them was the project of a single European currency. Although the argument for it had always had a predominantly political flavour, it was asserted that great economic benefits would flow from its introduction and that lower prices and lower interest rates would be likely to follow. With equal assurance, it was pointed out that participating states would lose control over important aspects of their economic life. A common currency, in fact, implied further surrender of sovereignty.

Politicians brooded over what voters might think when choices had to be made that would bring home to them the consequences of a monetary union. It was not hard to agree, though, that were monetary union to fail, and were enlargement not to take place, the EU could settle back into not much more than a simple customs union.

When Helmut Kohl was defeated in the German elections of November 1998 and Gerhard Schröder, the first socialist chancellor of united Germany, took office, this made no difference to the monetary-union goal of the German government. The French government, too, stayed behind it. Denmark and Sweden firmly announced they would not wish to participate. In Britain, the new Labour government of Tony Blair, elected in a landslide vote in 1997, while cautiously positive to further integration, refused to join ‘until the time was right’, and the right time was not to appear during Labour’s first ten years in office. But on 1 January 2002, most of the EU member countries introduced their first shared currency since the age of Charlemagne. In a telling avoidance of offence to national susceptibilities, the possibilities of great historic names – crowns, florins, francs, marks, thalers and many more – were set aside and the new unit of currency was to be called the ‘euro’. By the mid-2000s, its notes and coins were the only legal tender among the 300 million citizens of twelve member states, and it was even adopted by states and territories outside the EU, such as Montenegro and Kosovo.

The difficulties of enlarging the Union were by then much clearer. The longest-standing candidate for admission was Turkey, of whom some asked whether it was a ‘European’ country at all since most of its territory lay in Asia and most of its people were Muslim. Worse still, the modernizing Atatürk legacy was under challenge there after a sixty-year ascendancy. Islamists had always resented the regime’s traditional secularism. Yet if the test of Europeanness was modernity in institutions (representative government and women’s rights, for example) and a certain level of economic development, then Turkey clearly stood with the Europeans rather than with the rest of the Islamic Near East. Turkish treatment of political opposition and minorities (particularly the Kurds) none the less met with much disapproval abroad, and the record of the Turkish government as a guardian of human rights was questioned. Turkey thus posed yet again old and unanswerable questions about what Europe really was. Significantly, though, Turkey’s old enemy Greece has become one of the key supporters of membership for Ankara, arguing both along economic and political lines, in spite of unresolved issues over Cyprus (now a member of the EU in its own right).

At the end of 2000, in negotiations at Nice, while the principle of further expansion was agreed upon, it was also agreed to change voting qualifications – although France succeeded in hanging on to the same ‘weighted’ voting rights as Germany, now indisputably much the largest and wealthiest member state. Ratification of the Nice treaty had still to be obtained in national parliaments, of course, and the Irish government soon had to face the problem posed by losing a referendum on its proposal; this sent another shock through the system. Agreement at the end of 2001 that a special convention should consider the working of EU institutions, and of possible changes in them, only slightly offset this. And when in 2005 referenda in both France and the Netherlands rejected the product of that convention – the somewhat extravagantly termed ‘European Constitution’ – the project of further deepening the integration process seemed, again, to be in deep trouble. But while the popular rejection of the constitution treaty was yet another sign of the European Union still being an enterprise of and by the political élites, much of the content of the constitution would – perhaps for that reason – find its way into EU rules and regulations, thanks to an amended version of the proposed constitution being brought back for referenda in the countries that rejected it.

To an extent, then, the end of the Cold War seemed at last to have revealed that Europe was more than the geographical expression it had so long seemed to be. Equally, though, there seemed less point than ever in seeking some innate European essence or spirit, let alone a European civilization, the major source of a world civilization though it might be. It was as ever a collection of national cultures resonating vigorously to their own internal dynamics, for, as the twenty-first century began, there was little sign of a European patriotism able, like the old national allegiances, to stir the emotions of the masses, for all that had been achieved since the Treaty of Rome. Participation by voting in elections for the European parliament had fallen everywhere except in those countries where voting was compulsory. Linguistic chauvinism threatened a new unworkability in the institutions of the Union – whose huge, disordered complexity already baffled those who sought political logic in them and undoubtedly contributed to a larger public sense of boredom with the idea of Europe.

But much had been achieved. Above all, the Union was a community of constitutional democracies and the first successful essay in European integration not based on the hegemony of a single nation. As the twenty-first century commenced, too, the EU was, even in rising economic gales, in the long run evidently an economic success. Its member states had a population of almost 500 million and accounted for some 20 per cent of world trade (most of it between her own member countries). Its GDP in 2010 was larger than that of the United States and three times that of Japan. Europe was one of the three prime movers of the world economy that had emerged in the previous fifty years. If Europeans still seemed to worry a lot about where they were going, they were obviously a team many outsiders wished to join.

The year 1989 had left much doubt about the future direction of China. Not only had the ruling Communist Party faced a significant challenge from below – which it could only overcome by the use of raw force – but the economy also seemed to be stumbling, with growth flattening out in many sectors. Deng Xiaoping, the man who had engineered the economic reforms ten years earlier and who, at the age of eighty-five, had returned to the centre of political decision-making as the 1989 crisis grew, now embarked on his last campaign. Visiting the southern provinces in 1992, Deng condemned those who saw political retrenchment as synonymous with economic retrenchment. The reforms had to be intensified, Deng said, and private enterprise should be given more room. By then, the 1989 stagnation was already a thing of the past, and from 1992 on China entered a phase of hyper-growth, with its GDP increasing by more than 10 per cent on average for the next fourteen years.

The explosion of economic growth in China may turn out to be the most important global event since the 1990s. Not only did it create a middle class of more than 400 million people with a purchasing power around the EU average, it also made China into the second largest national economy on earth. Most of this growth was in the private sector, but – after much restructuring – there was also some growth in the publicly owned or controlled sector by the early 2000s. China’s economic model seemed to combine extreme capitalism with a very important role for the state and even the Communist Party. It combines rampant exploitation of the masses of young men and women who enter into the factories from the countryside with an emphasis on political control of all companies, including those that are privately owned by Chinese or foreigners. While gradually spreading north and west, economic growth is still heavily concentrated in the south and east, along the coast and along the great rivers, repeating a pattern that has been visible since the earliest dynasties. And while becoming a guarantor of regional economic stability, the regime has done little to make itself more accountable to its people through democratic reforms, and – as a result of the lack of transparency – corruption and the misuse of power among officials is widespread. While the CCP seems to have found a development model that works, at least in good times, it has little to fall back on in terms of legitimacy when times turn bad.

The end of the Cold War also transformed China’s foreign relations. Over 4,000 miles of shared frontier with the former USSR were replaced for about half that distance by frontiers with the newly independent and much weaker states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Meanwhile, in the later 1990s, concern over Taiwan, the problem that had long tied together Chinese internal policy and foreign relations, was clearly as alive as ever after nearly five decades in which the seemingly fundamental nature of the original clash between the Nationalist regime there and the People’s Republic had, in fact, been slightly blurred after the formal closure of American diplomatic relations with the Taiwanese government and its subsequent exclusion from the United Nations. Yet in the 1990s, while Beijing still maintained its policy of reuniting Taiwan (like Hong Kong and Macao) to mainland China as a long-term goal, more began to be heard of alleged independence sentiment on the island. Beijing was evidently disturbed, alarm reaching its height during a visit by the president of the Taiwanese republic to the United States in 1995. The ambassador of the People’s Republic in Washington was withdrawn and an official newspaper proclaimed the issue of Taiwan as ‘explosive as a barrel of gunpowder’. It was clear that if Taiwan formally declared itself independent of the mainland, an invasion of the island would probably follow.

Taiwan, moreover, was only one source of uncertainty and nervousness in East Asia. An increasing instability and volatility was apparent in the region after the Cold War ended, even though these trends did not reach the same levels as in Europe. What the closing of that relatively well-defined and therefore clarifying struggle might mean was at first very hard to see. In Korea, for example, it changed very little; North Korea remained obstinately locked in a confrontation with the United States and with the Republic of Korea in the south by its rulers’ determination to maintain a command economy in virtual isolation. Economic mismanagement, the ending of Soviet aid in 1991 and, it appeared, some straightforward dynastic exploitation of power by the ruling dictator, brought North Koreans to the edge of starvation by early 1998. North Korea’s problems remained unusually specific, detached somewhat from the regional trends as South Korea could not be. That country was, by the mid-1990s, an established democratic regime with high growth figures and an impressive involvement in international trade.

While all of East and South-East Asia, China excepted, went through a deep but, for most countries, temporary financial crisis in 1997 and 1998, Japan entered a recession after the Cold War that was to last for more than a decade and from which the country is still struggling to recover. The economy often hailed in the 1980s as the world leader in productivity and product development was by the end of the century a shadow of its former self. Property speculation and huge investment in non-productive activity or sectors generating very small returns had encumbered its banks and financial institutions with unserviceable debts. The currency weakened sharply; speculation against it was immediate and crippling in a world of financial transactions more rapid than ever before. The prevailing business culture of Japan, firmly embedded as it was in official and financial networks that now proved unable to give decisive leadership, made solutions harder still to achieve as conditions worsened. The Japanese economy became a laggard in international terms, with deflation and unemployment the result. The rapidly shifting governments seemed unable to stem the process, and some of them began pandering to nationalist sentiments to strengthen their authority. The recession in Japan meant that it could not be counted on to help pull the other economies out of their economic difficulties in the late 1990s, and even though the region as a whole was growing again in the early 2000s, some countries – such as Indonesia and the Philippines – only slowly regained their earlier growth rates. Millions of people, from Hokkaido to Bali, lost their savings and sometimes their livelihoods in the process.

The political shifts in South-East Asia that followed the crisis were also significant. Authoritarian governments in some countries had exploited public resources in the interests of cronies of those in power and their families. In May 1998, after the Indonesian economy had shrunk by more than 8 per cent since the beginning of the year and the currency had lost four-fifths of its dollar value, riots drove the president from power. Thirty-two years of a firmly controlled, corrupt, but formally ‘democratic’ system came to an end. The successor governments made Indonesia a much more open society, but there was only a gradual rebuilding of the economy. For a while there was increasing ethnic and religious strife. But from the early 2000s growth returned, and under President Yudhoyono, a former general, political stability increased within a pluralist setting. By 2010 this mainly Muslim country of almost 250 million people was making rapid progress.

The second most populous country in the region, Vietnam, moved in the opposite direction, further centralizing its politics while intensifying Chinese-style economic reform, called doi moi (‘renovation’) in Vietnam. By the early 2000s Vietnam was the world’s second-fastest-growing economy, but large parts of the country were still very poor and – as in China – the exploitation of the workforce in the name of capitalism with Communist characteristics was intense. Altogether, what the extraordinary highs and lows of the East Asian economies had shown in the first decade of the twenty-first century was how integrated the global economy was becoming: economic shifts in Beijing or Jakarta would have an immediate effect on the world, and vice versa.

India, like China, did not at once share the violent financial and economic cycles of many East Asian countries. In this respect, undeniably, past policies favoured her. Congress governments, though moving away somewhat from the socialism of the early years of independence, had long been strongly influenced by protectionist, managed, nationally self-sufficient, even autarkic ideas. The price had been low rates of growth and social conservatism, but with them came also a lower degree of vulnerability to international capital flows than other countries.

In 1996 the Hindu and nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) inflicted a major defeat on the Congress Party and became the largest single party in the lower house of parliament. It was not able to sustain its own government, though, and a coalition government emerged, which did not survive another (very violent) general election in 1998. This election, too, was inconclusive in that no clear parliamentary majority emerged, but the BJP and its allies formed the biggest single group in it. Another coalition government was the outcome, whose Janata supporters soon published an ominously nationalist agenda that announced that ‘India should be built by Indians’. Some found this alarming in a country where nationalism, though encouraged by Congress for a century or so, had usually been offset by prudent recognition of the real fissiparousness and latent violence of the subcontinent. Eventually, though, the new government surprised many by avoiding Hindu-nationalist excesses domestically and by stepping up the liberalization of the economy, leading to increased economic growth in some parts of the country.

This growth continued under the new Congress-led government that – in another example of India’s functioning democracy – surprisingly was voted into office in 2004. The new prime minister, Manmohan Singh – an economist of Sikh origin – stepped up the attempts at opening India’s economy and making it more competitive internationally. By the mid-2000s, India seemed to be at the beginning of rapid economic expansion.

Though it seemed consistent with a determination to win domestic kudos by playing the nationalist card, it was none the less in the context of the running sore of the old quarrel with Pakistan that the world had to strive to understand the BJP government’s decision to proceed with a series of nuclear test explosions in May and June 1998. They provoked the Pakistan government to follow suit with similar tests of its own; both governments were now members of the club of nations acknowledged to have deployable nuclear weapons. Yet larger contexts in which to set this fact (the Indian prime minister pointed out) were those of Indian fears of China, already a nuclear power and remembered by Indians as the victor of the Himalayan fighting of 1962, and a growing sympathy shown by the Pakistan government to Islamic fundamentalist agitation in other countries – notably, Afghanistan, where 1996 had seen the establishment of an intensely reactionary government in Kabul, under a Pakistani-supported faction named Taliban. Some gloomily pondered the notion that a Pakistani bomb might also be an Islamic bomb. In any case, India’s actions had been a huge setback to the curbing of nuclear proliferation so far achieved; there was universal alarm, ambassadors were withdrawn from Delhi and some countries followed the lead of the United States in cutting off or holding up aid to India. Such action, though, did nothing to deter Pakistan from following India’s example. The world, evidently, had not rid itself of the danger of nuclear warfare by ending the Cold War. That danger, too, had now to be understood in a world that some thought much less stable than the 1960s had been, and with India–Pakistan relations still bedevilled by the Kashmir issue.

Russia, the biggest and most important of the CIS states, elected Boris Yeltsin president of the republic in June 1991 with 57 per cent of the votes cast in the country’s first free election since 1917. In November the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved by presidential decree. In January 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a programme of radical economic reform was launched which in one bold stroke led to an almost complete liberation of the economy from previous controls. The economic result of this was, for almost all citizens, an unmitigated disaster. While a few insiders got very rich, most people lost their savings, their pensions, or their jobs. Energy consumption fell by a third, accompanied by rapidly rising unemployment, falls in national income and real wages, a drop in industrial output by half, huge corruption in government organs and widespread crime. To many Russians, these abstractions were brought home in the savage detail of personal misery. Public health deteriorated and life expectancy declined to less than sixty years for males in the early 2000s, a drop of five years in less than a decade.

In 1993 a new parliament containing many of his enemies had been elected to add to Yeltsin’s difficulties. Others were posed by relations with non-Russian republics of the CIS (in which there lived 27 million Russians) and by the clans of political interest which had emerged around bureaucratic and industrial foci in the new Russia, as well as by disappointed ex-reformers, of whom Yeltsin had sacked a great many. It was not long before it began to be recognized that Russia’s troubles were not solely attributable to the Soviet legacy, but owed much to the general state of Russia’s historic culture and civilization. In 1992, Russia had itself become a federation and in the following year a presidential, even autocratic constitution completed the country’s constitutional framework. But Yeltsin soon had to face the challenge of opposition from both left and right and, eventually, of insurrection. After he had suspended parliament’s functions by decree ‘on gradual constitutional reform’, over a hundred people were killed in the worst civil bloodshed in Moscow since 1917. Like his earlier dissolution of the Communist Party, this was seen as presidential high-handedness. No doubt the president’s personality made forceful action more congenial to him than patient diplomacy. Nevertheless, considering he had so little to offer Russians in the way of material comfort, as the economy was exploited by corrupt officialdom and entrepreneurs on the make, it was to the credit of his government, and thanks to the Russians’ love of their new-found political freedom, that he managed to fight off the neo-Communist challenge and achieve re-election as president in 1996.

Two years before that a new problem had emerged, a national insurrection in land-locked Chechnya, an autonomous republic in the Russian federation with a predominantly Muslim population. Some Chechens deplored and would avenge, they said, the immorality of their conquest and suppression by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and the genocidal policy carried out by Stalin in the 1940s. Their anger and resistance was stiffened by the brutality with which the Russians, alarmed by the dangerous example that might be given to other Muslims, reduced the Chechen capital to ruins and the countryside to starvation. Thousands were killed, but Russian casualties re-awoke memories of Afghanistan and there were all-too-evident dangers of fighting spilling over into neighbouring republics. Ever since 1992, after all, a Russian garrison had been propping up the government of now-independent Tajikistan against the danger of its overthrow by Islamic radicals supported from Pakistan. Against this doubtful background, not much was left by 1996 of the hopes raised by perestroika and glasnost, and additional gloom was cast over the situation as it became clear that President Yeltsin’s health was poor (and probably made worse by heavy drinking). By then events outside Russia, notably in the former Yugoslavia, prompted gestures and very vocal reminders to western powers that the country still aspired to play the great power role it felt was its due, and evidence of the growing concern Russia felt over the implications of intervention there in the affairs of an independent sovereign state.

By 1998, however, the Russian government could hardly gather taxes and pay its employees. The year 1997 had been the first since 1991 in which GDP had registered a real, if tiny, increase, but the economy was still abandoned to the mercy of special interests as the state sold off more and more of its investments to private business, often on a corrupt and favoured basis. Huge fortunes were rapidly made by some, but millions of ordinary people suffered unpaid wages, the disappearance of daily necessities from the markets, continuing price rises, and the irritations and hostilities that inevitably arose as high levels of consumption for some confronted poverty face-to-face in the streets. Then, in 1998, came a financial crash and the country’s repudiation of foreign debt. Yeltsin had to replace a prime minister he had chosen for his commitment to market economics and to accept one imposed upon him by his opponents. Yet the next parliamentary elections returned a parliament less likely to quarrel with him, and on New Year’s Eve 1999, he felt able to announce his resignation.

His successor was already at that moment serving as his prime minister. Boris Yeltsin had duly announced that the next president should be Vladimir Putin, and accordingly Putin took up office after the election of March 2000. A former member of the KGB, Putin by then had to his credit in the eyes of many Russians a – temporary it turned out – success in pacifying Chechnya and the decline of the danger that its turbulence might spread beyond its original borders. It seems likely that outcry abroad over threats to human rights in Chechnya further helped to rally patriotic support behind him, but he had also made a favourable impression in western capitals. In spite of the misfortunes of a series of accidental disasters in his first months as president, which indicated the rundown state of Russia’s infrastructure, there was a new sense that grave problems were at last going to be surmounted. In a more narrowly personal sense, that was no doubt true also for Yeltsin, who, with his family, was assured by his successor of immunity from prosecution for offences committed during his presidency.

Putin’s presidency put a new vigour into Russian government after the lethargy of the last Yeltsin years. The new president, only forty-eight when he took office, projected an austere and reserved image that most Russians liked after his extrovert but often inefficient predecessor. Putin wanted to be known as a man of action. He immediately began recentralizing power in Russia and cracked down on the super-rich – the so-called ‘oligarchs’ – when they would not do the bidding of the Kremlin. After his re-election in 2004, however, concerns began to be voiced about the pressure his government exercised on Russian media critical of the president’s policies.

While the events of 11 September 2001 had given Putin a welcome chance to portray his aggressive conduct of the war in Chechnya as a war against terrorists – and thereby avoid too vocal a reaction from the West – he had little success in bringing the conflict to a close. His attempts at influencing Russia’s former Soviet neighbour-states to take a more friendly attitude to the new Russia have also mostly backfired. Putin’s most important contribution is to have created some form of economic stability; by 2005, inflation had been stemmed and Russian GDP was gradually increasing. Still, Vladimir Putin, even after his re-re-election in 2011, is likely to be seen as a transitional figure on the way to a new Russian society that re-takes its place among the world’s great centres of power.

Taking a long backward look from the early twenty-first century, the United States, much more clearly than in 1945, was the world’s greatest power. For all the heavy weather of the 1970s and 1980s, and a cavalier piling up of public debt through budgetary deficit, its gigantic economy continued to show over the long run a huge dynamism and seemingly endless power to recover from setbacks. Its slowing as the 1990s drew to a close did not check this. For all the political conservatism which so often struck foreigners, the United States remained one of the most adaptive and rapidly changing societies in the world.

Yet as the last decade of the twentieth century began, many old problems still remained. Prosperity had made it easier for those Americans who did not have to face those problems in person to tolerate them, but it had also provided fuel for the aspirations, fears and resentments of black Americans. This reflected the social and economic progress they had made since the Johnson presidency, the last that had seen a determined effort to legislate black America out of its troubles. Although the first black state governor in the nation’s history took up office in 1990, only a couple of years later the inhabitants of the Watts district of Los Angeles, notorious for their riots a quarter of a century before, again showed that they saw the Los Angeles police force as little more than members of an occupying army. Over the country as a whole, a young black male was seven times more likely than his white contemporary to be murdered, probably by a fellow black, and was more likely to go to prison than to a university. If nearly a quarter of American babies were then being born to unmarried mothers, then two-thirds of black babies were, an index of the breakdown of family life in the black American communities. Crime, major deteriorations in health in some areas, and virtually unpoliceable inner-city areas still left many responsible Americans believing that the nation’s problems were racing away from solution.

In fact, some of the statistics were beginning to look better. If Bill Clinton (who took up the presidency in 1993) disappointed many of his supporters by the legislation he actually could deliver, the Republicans in Congress got much of the blame for that. Although, too, the burgeoning phenomenon of rapidly growing numbers of ‘Hispanic’ Americans, swollen by legal and illegal influx from Mexico and the Caribbean countries, worried many people, President Clinton set aside recommendations to restrict immigration further. The population of those with Hispanic ancestry had doubled in thirty years, and now stands at roughly one-eighth of the total. In California, the richest state, it provided a quarter of the population and a low-wage labour pool; even in Texas, Hispanics were beginning to use politics to make sure their interests were not overlooked. Meanwhile, in a modish figure of speech, Clinton could surf the economic wave. Disappointments in his domestic policy tended to be attributed by supporters to his opponents rather than to his own failures of leadership and excessive care for electoral considerations. Although the Democrats lost control of the legislature in 1994, his re-election in 1996 was a triumph, and success for his party in the mid-term elections followed.

Nevertheless, Clinton’s second presidential term was a disappointment. In his defence it can be said that he had at the outset inherited an office sadly diminished in prestige and power since the Johnson days and the early Nixon years. The authority the presidency had accumulated under Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and during the early Cold War had swiftly and dramatically ebbed away after Nixon. But Clinton did nothing to stem the rot. Indeed, for many Americans he made it worse. His personal indiscretions laid him open to much-publicized and prolonged investigations of financial and sexual improprieties, which led in 1999 to an unprecedented event: the hearing of charges by the Senate against an elected president with the aim of bringing about his impeachment. (Coincidentally, in that year an attempted impeachment of Boris Yeltsin also failed.) Yet Clinton’s public-opinion poll ratings stood higher as the hearings began than they had done a year earlier, and the impeachment attempt failed. Those who had voted for him were content, it seemed, with what he was believed to have tried to do, even if they were not oblivious to his defects of character.

As the Clinton terms unrolled, the United States had also come to appear to squander the possibilities of world leadership which had come with the end of the Cold War. Whatever the average reporting of American newspapers and television bulletins, there had seemed then to be for a moment some hope that traditional parochialism might be permanently in eclipse, and that the United States would work with other countries globally to improve conditions for all. Concerns which required continuous and strenuous efforts by the United States in every part of the globe could hardly be ignored. They were indeed to loom larger still in the next ten years, but this was soon obscured by the ambiguities of American policy. Clinton’s aim was first and foremost to assist in the globalization of market economies and for other countries to learn from the success of the United States. While a multilateralist at heart, Clinton was much too careful a politician to risk going against an American public tired of the international campaigns of the Cold War. Many issues that the United States could have taken a lead on, such as world poverty and global ecological issues, were therefore brushed under the carpet in return for his electorate viewing Clinton as ‘the feel-good president’ – he made them feel good in return for doing very little except enriching themselves.

Soon, however, the peace-keeping activities of the United Nations were troubling American policy. While the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the UN in 1995 prompted Clinton to tell his countrymen that to turn their backs on the organization would be to ignore the lessons of history, his remarks were provoked by the action earlier that year of the lower house of the American Congress in proposing to cut the American contribution to the costs of UN peace-keeping – against a background, moreover, of American default on its subscriptions to the normal budget of the UN amounting to over $270 million (nine-tenths of the total arrears from all nations which were owed to the organization). United States policy seemed to reach a turning-point with the collapse of a UN intervention in Somalia in 1993 which had led to casualties among UN forces taking part and to spectacular television footage of the maltreatment of the bodies of American servicemen by enraged and exultant Somalis. Soon, the refusal of American participation in or support of UN intervention in the African states of Burundi and Rwanda showed what disastrous consequences could flow from American refusal to participate, or to permit forceful intervention with ground forces, in peace-keeping, let alone peace-making. In these two small countries, each ethnically bitterly divided for generations into a ruling minority and a subject majority, the outcome in 1995–6 was genocidal massacre. Over 600,000 were killed and millions (out of a total population of only about 13 million for both countries together) were driven into exile as refugees. It seemed the UN could do nothing if Washington would not move.

After President Clinton had authorized limited air-strikes against Bosnian Serb forces to bring about the peace settlement that was finally signed at Dayton in 1995, there was much debate among scholars, journalists and politicians about what the world role of the United States should be. Much of this debate centred around the proper use of American power and the ends to which it should be applied – and even about potential wars of civilizations. Meanwhile, Clinton’s diplomacy appeared caught between the wish to create a world more amenable to American ideological goals and a wish to avoid military casualties, first and foremost among Americans.

Among new international problems to be faced was the appearance of new potential sources of nuclear danger. North Korea’s modest nuclear programme in 1993–4 showed (and the Indian and Pakistani tests of 1998 reaffirmed) that the United States was now one of several of a slowly growing group of nuclear-armed states (seven openly acknowledged; two others not), whatever its huge superiority in delivery systems and potential weight of attack. America also had no reason any longer to believe (as had sometimes been possible in the past) that all of these states would make rational – by American standards – calculations about where their interests lay. But this was only one new consideration in policy-making after the end of the Cold War.

In the Middle East, early in the 1990s American financial pressure over the spread of Jewish settlements on the Israeli occupied West Bank looked for a time as if it might persuade the Israeli government, harassed by the intifada and its accompanying terrorism, that a merely military solution to the Palestine problem was not going to work. Then, after great efforts, helped by the benevolent offices of the Norwegian government, secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian representatives in Oslo in 1993 at last led to an encouraging new departure. The two sides then declared that it was time ‘to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize … mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence’. It was agreed that an autonomous Palestinian Authority (firmly defined as ‘interim’) should be set up to administer the West Bank and the (similarly occupied) Gaza Strip, and that a definitive peace settlement should be concluded within five years. This appeared to promise greater stability for the Middle East as a whole; it gave the Palestinians their first significant diplomatic gains. But the continuing implanting of new Israeli settlements in areas occupied by Israeli forces soon poisoned the atmosphere again. Optimism began to wilt when there was no cessation of terrorist attacks or of reprisals for them. Palestinian bombs in the streets of Israeli cities indiscriminately killed and maimed scores of shoppers and passers-by, while a Jewish gunman who killed thirty Palestinians in their mosque at Hebron won posthumous applause from many of his countrymen for doing so. Even so, hope lingered on; Syria, Jordan and the Lebanon all resumed peace negotiations with Israel, and a beginning was in fact made in the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the designated autonomous Palestinian areas.

Then, in November 1995, came the assassination of the Israeli prime minister by a fanatical fellow countryman. The following year, a conservative prime minister, dependent on the parliamentary support of Jewish extremist parties, took office. His popular majority was tiny, but it was clear that, for the immediate future at least, it was unlikely that anything but an aggressive policy of further territorial settlement by Israel would be forthcoming and that the Oslo agreements were in question. Even the election of a new Labour government in 1999 did not lead to a return to the promise of the Oslo agreement. New negotiations, led by Bill Clinton in the waning days of his presidency, failed spectacularly in achieving any concrete settlement. The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, spent the remaining years of his life (he died in 2004) besieged by Israeli troops in his compound in Ramallah, after a new Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000. In 2006 the Islamist group Hamas – a party dedicated to the extermination of Israel – won control of the Palestinian parliament. Americans were evidently doing no better than other outsiders to the region in grappling with the consequences of the creation of the Zionist programme a century earlier, and the Balfour declaration of 1917.

Nor did United States policy in the Persian Gulf provide lasting solutions there. Sanctions authorized by the United Nations did no good in Iran or Iraq, and patient and assiduous effort by the latter had by the mid-1990s to all intents and purposes broken any chance of maintaining the broad-based coalition of 1991 against it. Saddam Hussein’s government seemed untroubled by the sanctions; they bore heavily on his subjects, but could be tempered by the smuggling in of commodities the regime desired. Iraq was still a large oil exporter and revenues from this source made possible some restoration of its military potential while no effective inspection of the country’s production of weapons of mass destruction – as ordered by the United Nations – was taking place. American policy was as far as ever from achieving its own revolutionary and evident goal of overthrowing the regime, even when (supported only by the British) it fell back again on open aerial warfare for four nights in December 1998, to no avail. Nor did it help American prestige when suspicion arose that the timing of the bombing offensive might have some connection with a wish to distract attention from the impeachment proceedings about to begin in Washington.

Although 1998 had begun with President Clinton stressing in his State of the Union message that domestic conditions indicated that these were ‘good times’ for Americans, this was not proving true in foreign affairs. In August, American embassies were attacked by Muslim terrorists in both Kenya and Tanzania, with heavy loss of life. Within a couple of weeks there was an American reply in the form of missile attacks on alleged terrorist bases in Afghanistan and the Sudan (where the factory attacked was said to have been preparing weapons for germ warfare, a charge whose credibility rapidly faded). The embassy bombings were both linked by Bill Clinton to the mysterious figure of Osama bin Laden, a Saudi extremist, in a speech which also alleged that there was ‘compelling’ evidence that further attacks against United States citizens were planned. When, in November, a Manhattan federal Grand Jury indicted Osama bin Laden and an associate on over 200 charges relating to the embassy attacks, as well as to other attacks on American service personnel and an abortive bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center in New York, it caused no surprise when he failed to appear in court to answer them. It was believed bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban regime, which had taken control of that country in the ruins of the Soviet war in the mid-1990s.

As 1999 began, Kosovo was at the centre of the troubles of the former Yugoslavia. When spring passed into summer, a strategic commitment at last taken in March of that year to a purely air campaign by NATO forces (but carried out mainly by Americans) against Serbia appeared to be achieving little except a stiffening of its people’s will to resist and an increase in the flow of refugees from Kosovo. The Russians were alarmed by NATO’s action, unsupported as it was by United Nations’ authorization, and felt it ignored their traditional interest in the area. The casualties inflicted on civilians – both Serbian and Kosovan – were soon causing misgivings in domestic opinion within the nineteen NATO nations, while the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, had apparently had his confidence increased by Bill Clinton’s assurance that there would be no NATO land invasion. What was happening was indeed unusual: the armed coercion of a sovereign European state because of its behaviour to its own citizens.

Meanwhile, over three-quarters of a million Kosovan refugees crossed the frontier in search of safety in Macedonia and Albania, bringing stories of atrocities and intimidation by Serbs. It appeared that it was the deliberate intention of the Belgrade government to drive out at least parts of the non-Serb majority of the province. Then came a disastrous mishap. Acting on out-of-date information – and therefore in avoidable error – American aircraft scored direct hits on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing members of its staff. Beijing refused even to listen to the apology Clinton attempted to give. An orchestrated television campaign had already presented the Chinese people with an interpretation of the whole NATO intervention as a simple act of American aggression. Well-organized student mobs now attacked the American and British embassies in Beijing (though without going quite so far as the extremes experienced during the Cultural Revolution). Conveniently (the ten-year anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square was coming up), student steam was thus let off in anti-foreign riots.

The depth of Chinese concern about America’s world role can hardly be doubted, nor that China’s involvement, like Russia’s, in the Kosovo crisis was likely to make it harder for NATO to achieve its aims. The Chinese were strong believers in the veto system of the United Nations Security Council, seeing it as protection for the sovereignty of individual nations. They were also disinclined to view with sympathy would-be Kosovan separatists, sensitive as they had always been to any danger of fragmentation in their own huge country. In the deep background, too, must have lain thoughts of a reassertion of their own historic world role, as well as the specific irritations of recent years. For a century after the Opium War, after all, China had never been without the humiliation of European and United States troops assuring ‘order’ in several of her cities. Perhaps it had crossed the minds of some Chinese that it would be a sweet reversal of fortunes if Chinese soldiers should in the end form part of a peace-keeping force in Europe.

Thanks to the American president’s wish to avoid at all costs the exposure of ground troops to danger, just as Bosnia had destroyed the credibility of the United Nations as a device for assuring international order, it now appeared that Kosovo might destroy that of NATO. Early in June, however, it appeared that the damage done by bombing, together with timely Russian efforts to mediate and British pressure for a land invasion by NATO forces, were at last weakening the will of the Serbian government. That month, after mediation in which the Russian government took part, it was agreed that a NATO land force should enter Kosovo in a ‘peace-keeping’ role. Serbian forces then withdrew from Kosovo and the province was occupied by NATO. It was not the end of the troubles of the former Yugoslav federation. In 2006 NATO soldiers were still there, and there was still uncertainty about the long-term future of Kosovo, even if the Serb minority was getting smaller as the Albanian majority used strong-arm methods to control the province. But by then there had been a notable change of mood and of government in Belgrade and the former Serbian president had been arrested and handed over to a new international court at The Hague, which had begun to try offenders against international law on war crimes and other charges.

As Clinton’s presidency moved towards its close, he at different times asserted the need to reverse the decline in defence spending, indicated that the proposals for imposing limits on the emission of industrial gases damaging to the climate were unacceptable, and strove to reassure China by efforts to secure normal trading relations with her; China was to secure admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. The Republican candidate in the presidential election of 2000, George W. Bush, the son of George H. W. Bush who had been beaten by Bill Clinton in 1992, emphasized in his successful campaign his anxiety to avoid the use of American troops on peace-keeping duties abroad and that he would authorize the building of a nuclear missile defence system to protect the United States against ‘rogue’ powers armed with such missiles. Earlier editions of this book have ended with the observation that we shall always find what happens somewhat surprising, because things tend to change on the one hand more slowly and on the other more rapidly than we tend to think. That seemed to be as true as ever – when events on 11 September 2001 changed things anew.

On the morning of that beautiful autumn day, four airliners travelling on scheduled flights within the United States were hijacked in flight by persons of Islamic or Middle Eastern background and origin. Without attempting, as had frequently been the case in similar acts of air piracy, to ask for ransoms or to make public statements about their goals, the terrorists diverted the aircraft and, in a combination of suicide and murder, flew two of them into the huge towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and another into the Pentagon building in Washington, the heart of American military planning and administration. The fourth crashed in open country, apparently forced down by the heroic efforts of some of its passengers to overcome the terrorists who had seized it. No one in any of the aircraft survived, the damage was immense in both the cities (above all in New York) and 3,000 people perished, many of them not Americans.

It was immediately apparent that it would take time to discover the full truth about these tragedies, but the immediate reaction of the American government was to attribute responsibility in a general sense to extremist Islamist terrorists, and President Bush announced an implicitly worldwide war against the abstraction ‘terrorism’. More particularly, Osama bin Laden was to be hunted down and brought to justice. In a sense, though, individual responsibility for 11 September was not the most important immediate consideration. Much more important was the excitement which erupted worldwide in the general relationship of Muslim radicalism – and perhaps of Islam itself – to such an atrocity. Because of this, the effects of what had happened were potentially even more important than the misery and terror they had brought to thousands and the physical and economic damage caused. A few such effects were immediately apparent in isolated anti-Muslim acts in several countries.

It rapidly became a cliché that everything had been changed by the events of 11 September. This, of course, was an exaggeration. For all the eventual repercussions of what followed, many historical processes went on unaltered in many parts of the world. But the effect of the attacks was, undoubtedly, galvanizing, and it made much evident that had only been implicit. Immediately and obviously, a huge shock had been given to the American consciousness. It was not to be measured only by the remarkable rallying of public opinion behind the president’s categorization of what had happened as the beginning of a ‘war’ – though one with no precisely identified enemy – nor, even, by the transformation of the political position of the new president, which, at the beginning of the year, after a disputed election, had been questioned by many. It was clear now that his countrymen felt again something of the national rage and unity that had followed the attack on Pearl Harbor nearly sixty years before. The United States had endured terrorist attacks at home and abroad for twenty years. The tragedy of 11 September, though, was wholly unprecedented in scale and, unhappily, suggested that other atrocities might be on the way. It was not surprising that Bush felt he could respond to democracy’s outrage in strong language and that the country overwhelmingly fell into line behind him.

It soon seemed likely that to the apprehension and bringing to trial of the shadowy figure of bin Laden would be added the aim of removing by force the threat of the ‘rogue states’ whose assistance to terrorism was presumed to have been available and essential. The practical implications of this went far beyond the preparation of conventional military efforts, and began immediately with a vigorous and worldwide American diplomatic offensive to obtain moral support and practical assistance. This was remarkably successful. Not all governments responded with equal enthusiasm, but almost all responded positively, including most Muslim countries and, more important still, Russia and China. The UN Security Council found no difficulty in expressing its unanimous sympathy; the NATO powers recognized their responsibilities to come to the assistance of an ally under attack.

Just as, in the days of the Holy Alliance after the Napoleonic Wars, Europe’s conservative powers had been haunted by the nightmare of conspiracy and revolution, in the years following the hijackings there was an alarming hint of a similar exaggerated fear of Islamist terrorism. That what had happened had been carefully and cleverly planned, there could be no doubt. But little was actually known about what the organizing powers really were and what were their ramifications and extent. It did not, at first sight, seem plausible that merely the work of one man could explain these acts. But neither could it be plausibly argued that the world was entering upon a struggle of civilizations, although some said so.

That United States policy abroad – above all, in support of Israel – had given much encouragement to the growth of anti-American feeling in Arab countries could not be doubted, even if that was a new idea for many Americans. There was widespread resentment, too, of the offensive blatancy with which American communications had thrust manifestations of an insensitive capitalist culture on sometimes poverty-stricken countries. In some places what could be regarded as American armies of occupation, guests rarely welcomed in any country, could be depicted as the upholders of corrupt regimes. But none of this could plausibly add up to a crusade against Muslims, any more than could the immense variety of Islamic civilization be seen as a monolithic opponent of a monolithic West. What was soon achieved was the removal of the hostile Taliban regime in Afghanistan, by a combination of the efforts of its local and indigenous enemies and American bombing, technology and military special forces. By the end of 2001 there was a new Afghan state formally in being, resourceless and dangerously divided into the fiefs of warlords and tribal enclaves though it seemed, and dependent on American and other NATO forces to fight its enemies. Elsewhere, the consequences of the ill-defined war on terrorism complicated events in Palestine. Arab states showed no willingness to cease to support the Palestinians when Israel attacked them, invoking the crusade against international terrorism.

The most disastrous effect of the 11 September atrocities was the decision taken by President Bush and his main international ally, Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, to invade Iraq in 2003. The main cause of the invasion was the growing fear, especially in the United States, that Saddam Hussein’s regime had chemical, bacteriological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Before September 2001 it would have been difficult to envisage a pre-emptive strike against a sovereign country based on (unfounded, as it turned out) suspicions of weapons’ stocks or acquisitions, however unpalatable that country’s regime was. But, for many Americans, the events of 11 September changed that. They were now ready – at least for a time – to follow a president who wanted to make use of the sense of post-tragedy emergency to deal with other potential threats. Even if Bush and Blair realized that Saddam – for all his anti-western bluff and bluster – had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, they thought his regime was an evil that had to be removed. In spite of stiff resistance from all the other members of the UN Security Council, and most of global public opinion, the United States and Britain started pushing for a UN resolution that would empower them to attack Iraq. When it became clear, in early March 2003, that no such resolution was forthcoming, the two countries, and some of their allies, decided to invade Iraq and remove Saddam’s regime even without the support of the UN.

The Second Gulf War lasted only twenty-one days in March/April 2003, but came to dominate international affairs at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It ended, predictably, with the removal, and later the trial and execution, of Saddam Hussein and the overthrow of his regime. But it also produced new fissures in world politics that proved difficult to plaster over, and lasting resistance in many areas of Iraq against what was seen as foreign occupation. In Europe, France, Germany and Russia opposed the invasion and spoke out against it. China condemned it as a violation of international law. NATO encountered its biggest post-Cold War crisis, when it could not agree on whether to support the invasion or not, and the United States was left with the new east European members as its staunchest supporters. But the biggest damage was done to the concept of a new post-Cold War world order in which consultations among the great powers and multilateral action should replace worldwide confrontation. The UN secretary-general, the Ghanaian Kofi Annan – a man the United States itself had worked hard to get elected – told the world that American and British action in Iraq was illegal. To him, and to many others, the real concern was not with Bush’s determination to get rid of Saddam, but with what would happen elsewhere, when other countries were determined to get rid of their enemies and the biggest power on earth had set an example through unilateral action.

Bush and Blair would have escaped some of the criticism they came in for after the invasion of Iraq if the occupation of that country had been better planned. Instead, parts of the country fell into anarchy after the collapse of the regime, as basic services stopped and the economy faltered. Looting and lawlessness were widespread for months after Iraqis – much helped by an American tank – toppled Saddam’s statue in the centre of Baghdad. Even though relations between the main ethnic and religious groups in Iraq would have been difficult to handle for any post-Saddam authority, the lack of security and the economic chaos helped inflame the situation. The majority Shia Muslims – long oppressed by the former Ba’ath regime’s mainly Sunni leaders – flocked to their religious guides for direction, many of whom wanted to establish an Islamic state similar to that in Iran. Meanwhile, a number of revolts started in the Sunni parts of the country, based both on Saddam loyalists, and, increasingly, on Sunni Islamists both from Iraq and other Arab countries. The new Iraqi authorities – a weak coalition government dominated by Shias – remained dependent on United States military support, while the Kurdish northern part of the country set up its own institutions separate from those in Baghdad.

By the end of the Cold War, the United States plainly exercised the first global hegemony in history. Its first attempts at exercising that hegemony had been stuttering, to say the least. The massacre of innocent lives on 11 September 2001 had set America in a direction that had led to the alienation of many of its friends and a war that it seemed unable to win fully or to withdraw from. As a result, soon after having won re-election in 2004, Bush the younger was more unpopular than any other president in living memory, except Richard Nixon when he faced imminent impeachment. But in spite of the invasion of Iraq having undone both Bush’s presidency and Tony Blair’s prime-ministership, there were few others who could come up with better recipes for how to employ American power in the post-Cold War world. Americans themselves were divided between those who thought the lesson of Iraq was more isolationism and those who wanted more multilateralism; more importantly, the rest of the world, while often complaining about the consequences of American unilateral action, had very little to put in its place when confronted with major crises. At the end of the post-Cold War era, the region in which civilization began had given birth to yet another twist in history’s long tale. The dismal fate of intruders and invaders in Mesopotamia was nothing new; the global predominance of one country clearly was. The United States undoubtedly had the power to remake international affairs, but was, as the Bush era ended, very uncertain about how to employ that power.

The United States elections in 2008 became an emphatic repudiation of the Bush years. Even the Republican candidate did not find much to defend in the former president’s record. But the most remarkable aspect of the election was that the Democratic Party nominated an African-American, Barack Obama, to be its standard-bearer. Obama’s message was to give America back the hope that it could be a transformational nation, not just domestically but internationally. He repudiated the interventionism of the 2000s, and declared that the United States would wield power by co-operating with others on a global scale. Obama’s popularity, both at home and abroad, initially marked him out as a president who hit the spirit of the age better than anyone since John Kennedy, and his beautifully crafted speeches promised change, although often of a rather undefined kind.

But the capacity for fundamental change eluded Obama, not least because he had inherited from his predecessor the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some economies had already noticed the potential for severe instability in the late 1990s, during the Asian banking crisis, or in Russia’s fickle casino capitalism (which by the 2000s had made a large majority of its people regret the collapse of Soviet-era security). In the United States the failure of one of its largest energy companies, Enron, in 2001, and, in particular, of the two main government-sponsored mortgage companies in the summer of 2008, should have set off alarm bells about some of the basic operating principles of the market. But the way the Cold War had ended, the seemingly all-conquering power of the marketplace, and some of the more radical free-market ideas that went along with it, had shunted most regulatory mechanisms aside. The system was posed for a fall.

What set the crisis off was a bubble in house prices in the United States. Both banks and buyers behaved as if prices would rise for ever, and as if interest rates would always stay remarkably low. Just a small upward adjustment of rates in 2007 led to the beginning of a decline in property prices; many buyers could no longer afford the higher payments on their mortgages, forcing them to sell and thereby setting off very steep falls in house prices all over the country. In some areas, such as Florida, prices dropped by up to 70 per cent.

For the banks that had issued cheap loans at a low margin this was bad news. But what was worse was that most banks had, directly or indirectly, moved into so-called ‘sub-prime mortgages’, which basically meant loans that the borrower only under the most optimistic of scenarios would be able to pay back. The mix of excessive risk taken by households and banks alike in the 2000s, set off a financial crisis of proportions unprecedented for almost three generations. In September 2008 the fourth largest American investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt with debts of $750,000 million. Even though the bank’s assets were enough to cover the major part of the debt, the collapse set off a chain reaction in financial markets that led the value of stocks on one American index to fall by more than 50 per cent in seventeen months.

President Obama, who was inaugurated in January 2009, was forced to put all his other priorities aside to deal with the financial crisis, which was threatening to become a world depression. By a combination of federal financial stimuli – printing money and targeting government expenditure, mostly – the worst of the immediate effects on industry and society was avoided, at least to begin with. The United States government, and governments elsewhere, also forced weak banks to recapitalize (meaning that they were either bought up by the state or by other banks). But public confidence in the market had been badly shaken, and credit became increasingly hard to come by. The effects of the crisis dragged on, fuelled by consumer uncertainty and stock market unpredictability. As late as 2011, unemployment in North America and in Europe remained high: in Spain 20 per cent; Ireland 15 per cent; and 9 per cent in the United States. These are not Great Depression levels, but they are signs of a recession of remarkable duration and depth.

Some people raised the question of whether it was also a sign of more profound change, such as the appearance of structural weaknesses in the capitalist system, or of a global shift in wealth and power from West to East. What was clear was that the lack of regulation and the appetite for risk had produced a crisis of great magnitude, one that most people would not be ready to dismiss as a product of general fluctuations in human fortunes. In Europe the political fall-out was great: public debt crises toppled governments from Ireland to Greece, and for some time the survival of the euro itself was brought into question. The British Labour government was replaced in 2010 by a shaky coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who started the biggest public austerity programme since the Second World War. But if people blamed the governments, they blamed the bankers even more. Blatant speculation and irresponsibility were seen as the main causes of the crisis. Few paused to ask whether the complexities of international finance were by now so great that nobody could be expected to understand the system fully. After all, the human brain was developed for very different purposes than following trading algorithms in the stock market (even the great Arab mathematician al-Khwarizmi himself would have been bemused).

Those who believed that the crisis was a symptom of a long-standing trend leading to the increased importance of Asia in human affairs had a field day. China seemed to move through the crisis with far less damage than did the West, and the great Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 (which killed at least 16,000 people) had more of an effect on East Asian economies than had the crisis that gripped much of the rest of the world. The whole North Atlantic world, it was argued, was living beyond its means; its economies were becoming less and less competitive compared to those of Asia, and their excessive borrowing had now defaulted, in more senses than one. But even though there is much truth in this perspective, it is far too simple to pick up the real causes and consequences of the 2008 crisis. The fact is that the world is increasingly interconnected as producers and consumers, as makers and users of tools and ideas, for a crisis in one part of the world not to have effects elsewhere. Asia may be advancing rapidly, but it will, from now on, always be affected to a very high degree by what happens elsewhere.

This interconnectivity of contemporary history became very visible in the spring of 2011, when massive changes in the Arab world suddenly got under way. As do most great revolutions, this one began with a small event, but one that was meaningful to millions. In Sidi Bouzid, a small Tunisian town on the edge of the desert, a young vegetable seller reacted in despair against the local authorities having confiscated his cart and slapped him when he went to protest. He set himself on fire outside the governor’s office. Mohamed Bouazizi’s terrible death caused demonstrations all over town. They then spread to other towns. By the end of January Tunisia’s dictator, who had ruled for twenty-three years, had fled into exile, and the people who chased him out set about introducing democratic reforms of a kind the Arab world had never seen before.

The Arab Spring, as it was called, turned into a collective protest against dictatorship, human rights’ violations, corruption, economic decline, youth unemployment and widespread poverty all over the Arab world. The way it started was telling; this was first and foremost a protest against the indignity of the lives of the young. Its weapon was mainly peaceful protest, at least at first. But when dictators resisted change, rebellions broke out. In Egypt, the most populous Arab state and seen by many Arabs as the centre of their culture, President Mubarak was removed from power in February 2011, after having ruled for thirty years, by young people occupying the central square in Cairo. The changes seemed to go on and on. In Yemen the president was forced to resign. In Morocco and Jordan the kings agreed to the gradual introduction of full democracy. And in Libya the longest-serving dictator of all, Muammar Gaddafi, misjudged the public mood to such an extent that he was not only driven from power, but hunted down and killed in October.

The latter change, in Libya, only happened after months of fighting, and after NATO had intervened on the side of the rebels. The intervention was welcomed not only by most Libyans, but requested by the Arab League. Nothing could be more telling for how things were about to change: after a decade of worrying about Islamism in all its forms, the West intervened in Libya to protect local rebels – among them many who had an Islamist background – from a dictator who, belatedly, in his most lucid moments had made a point of co-operating with the West against ‘terrorists’. As President Obama wound down the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (not least because the United States could no longer afford them), the whole political spectre of the Muslim world seemed to be changing. Bin Laden, the head of the terrorist group behind the 11 September attacks, was shot in an American military operation in Pakistan in May 2011, while millions of young Muslims were in the streets clamouring for democracy and respect for the individual. History sometimes moves in ways that are very hard to foresee.

But some problems are even more intractable than stagnation in the Arab world. In Haiti, on the Caribbean island where Columbus created the first European settlement in the Americas, there was also a devastating earthquake, in 2010, which destroyed much of the capital and the regions around it. About a quarter of a million people were killed. But, unlike in Japan, the recovery efforts provided little relief for the Haitian population, in spite of the near $2,000 million donated by American relief organizations alone. While the earthquake and its aftermath brought Haiti to the top of international news reports for the first time, its problems are not new. The country is the poorest in the western hemisphere, with a GDP per capita of US $667. Most of its élite prefers to spend its time in the United States, less than two hours’ flying time away, where per capita GDP is $47,600. The ticket, economy class, costs about $300, roughly half the average annual wage in Haiti.

Haiti’s problems are endemic poverty and extensive social inequality. And first among the many reasons for its poverty are the lack of education and infrastructure. Political stagnation plays a role as well, but whether that is a by-product of corruption or it is the other way around is hard to say. What is clear is that all the help in the world could not alone rectify Haiti’s problems. Such a transformation there and elsewhere with similar troubles will have to come from within. But how to break the cycle of misery is a difficult question, especially in a country where poverty-induced illness is rampant and infant mortality is a staggering 90 per 1,000 live births (in Canada it is 5 per 1,000). Haiti will stagger on, now led by President Martelly, a former Kompa music star known as ‘Sweet Micky’. Its problems will not go away anytime soon. History often seems to turn most slowly when human need for change is greatest. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the capacity for change is always there, even in its darkest corners.